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Website failures often marketing-inflicted

You said how much traffic?

A quarter of website crashes and overloads are caused by bad internal
communications, according to a study by web testing service
SciVisum.

Some 73 per cent of companies had experienced website failures during online
campaigns, and 26 per cent of marketing departments confessed that they never
alert the IT department about impending campaigns.

A further 52 per cent only 'sometimes' or 'rarely' work with the IT
department before the start of a new campaign, and only 22 per cent of those
surveyed always involve the IT department.

"Forget hackers, British firms are shooting themselves in the foot when it
comes to keeping their websites running," said Deri Jones, chief executive at
SciVisum.

"It's counterproductive to try and attract customers to your site that you
can't support and end up driving away.

"UK businesses urgently need to bridge this yawning gap between their
marketing and IT departments or they will end up destroying customer confidence
and damaging their corporate reputations."

Nearly two thirds of marketing personnel said they have no idea how many user
transactions their website can support, despite an average transaction value of
£50 to £100.

The study found that 47 per cent do not know how many users abandon their
sites with incomplete transactions. Some 18 per cent estimated that at least
half their users were abandoning transactions, and a further 16 per cent
estimated up to a quarter of users.

Michael Allen, global performance director at
Compuware, said: "This
is really about risk management. Businesses should be using risk prediction and
testing technologies to work out how many users their websites can cope with.
It's all about giving the marketing people visibility of the risks of failure."

Although 49 per cent had looked into why users were abandoning transactions,
almost half were unable to discover the cause from their IT departments, being
informed that it was too complicated or that the investigation was inconclusive.

Spencer Gallagher, managing director of web firm
Bluehalo, said: "It's
really about getting these different groups to talk to each other. The IT teams
often come in late on a project and are more focused on some of the technical
issues, so there can be communications problems."